Sermon for Matins: Dawkins and The God Delusion (part 2)

Sermon for Matins: Dawkins and The God Delusion (part 2)

11 February 2007 at :00 am

Through the month of February in the sermons at Matins I am
responding to a book that has been continuously in the bestseller
lists since it was published last year: Richard Dawkins' The God
Delusion. Dawkins' book is a searing attack on belief in God,
developing points made in his television programmes 'The Root of
All Evil?'. He outlines four functions of religion, which he takes
apart one by one.

The first is explanation. Last week, I spoke about the
different sorts of explanation that are associated with different
types of knowledge. I argued that, though in the past, and still
amongst some evangelical Christians, Christianity has been expected
to provide an explanation about what the universe is, and where we
have come from, for many of us this is not what Christianity is all
about. We don't expect the Bible to give us an explanation of the
origin of the universe or of our species. I suggested that being a
Christian is rather like being a character in The Complete Works
of Shakespeare: the Complete Works, because The
Complete Works contains different plays with different
characters in different situations. This is a bit like the way we
have different religions in the world, and each religion, like each
play, has its own world-view.

To be a Christian is, then, a bit like being a character in a
Shakespeare play. As we read Scripture, we are drawn into seeing
the world as though we were ourselves a character in the Scriptural
narrative. When we read the Gospels, it as though we say, 'You are
the Messiah, the Son of the living God'; we say 'Crucify him;' and
we say, 'My Lord and my God'. And as we do so, we find new,
Jesus-centred explanations as to why we experience life the way we
do. So, there is a sense in which our Christian faith does help us
explain who we are and what we are, but not in the scientific sense
that is so important for Dawkins.

This brings me to Dawkins second function of religion, which he
calls exhortation. Dawkins thinks religion gives us moral
exhortation, telling us how to behave and how not to. Much of that
religious exhortation he abhors. Here again, religious people can
agree that religion does have a key role in passing on teaching
about how we ought to behave. And that certain features of the
morality carried in the past by religion are rightly to be rejected
today. When Christians in this country faced up to the cruelty of
the slave trade, they came to see it was incompatible with some of
the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. But this took time,
and for a hundred years Christians argued vigorously on both sides
of the debate: in America it brought them to civil war. As an
Anglican Christian I would hope to maintain a questioning attitude
towards the morality that comes to us through our religious
tradition. In our religious tradition we have the secure ground we
need both for moral commitment and for moral
exploration. For a Christian, the central moral value conveyed by
our religious tradition - never to be rejected - is quite simply
that of love (interpreted particularly in the light of forgiveness
and reconciliation). The question is how that cashes out today in a
rapidly changing world. It is striking that Dawkins has virtually
nothing to say about love, and certainly not about an ethic of
love.

Dawkins' lack of discussion of what is central to Christian
morality comes about, I think, because he separates morality and
religion. He discusses morality before he discusses religion. For
him, Darwinian theory explains why we feel moral obligations
towards those close to us which we do not feel towards strangers
(we share the same genes) and why we feel that we should not steal
from or lie to members of our own group (the group or tribe that
lives this way is more likely to survive). Dawkins argues that such
instincts go very deep indeed.

He also argues that there are advantages for religions which
promote this kind of morality. Just as there is competition among
genes and among species, there is competition among religious ideas
and cultural practices. He doesn't consider the possibility that
some of those that thrive do so because they convey a particular
truth or truths. For Dawkins, to look for truth in religion is to
fall prey to a delusion.

Dawkins gives a characteristically functional account of
religion, looking at what religions can do for their adherents.
However, right at the heart of his project is his determination to
show the advantage of believing in no religion at all. The atheist,
he argues, is free from the delusions promoted by religious belief,
and can therefore function better in the world. The atheist can
espouse a vigorous and challenging morality untrammelled by the
teachings of religion. To argue this, Dawkins must separate
morality from religion, in the hope that religion will drop away.
Religionless atheists, he says, can be just as moral in their own
way as believers.

I would see things differently. I would argue that for humans
the origins of morality and the origins of religion are absolutely
interwoven. Significantly, Dawkins does not define what he means
either by religion or morality. The root of the word religion lies
in the Latin word religio - meaning 'that which binds'. A
religion is a collection of beliefs and practices which binds
together a society. It is in principle shared: you can't have a
private religion with a membership of one. Since all human
societies seem in the past to have believed in God or the gods,
religion has been associated with belief in God or the gods. The
key point though is that to practise a religion is as much to
do certain things as to believe certain things. The
religion carries the beliefs, affirming and reinforcing them as
the religion is practised. In the West today we tend to separate
out morality and beliefs and to make one of the other optional; in
the religious life the two go together.

All religions have some kind of ritual. In religious ritual what
is being enacted is a whole way of experiencing the world. It is
enacted symbolically - often with the use of dance, chanting,
music, and readings from sacred texts. The use of symbolic
materials like water, fire, or food and the sharing of symbolic
meals is, of course, common, as is the practice of sacrifice.
Because these ritual acts are done together, the people are
bound together, and the values that they share are reinforced -
just as I am reinforcing Christian teaching by preaching this
sermon in a liturgical context now. Dawkins is right to point to
the importance of exhortation, but this central function of
religion would be better described by a word like
affirmation or even performance.

In response to Dawkins' attack on religion, we might well ask
what happens when you take away from society the belief that God or
the gods exist. Dawkins argument is that this sets us free; mine
that it sets us adrift. This is not as such an argument that God
exists, but it is an argument for the link between religion
and morality. I would argue that much of the social breakdown we
currently see reflected in the rising numbers of those imprisoned,
or the breakdown of marriage, can ultimately be traced to the lack
of shared religious belief binding society together, and that not
to have this social bond is indeed a serious loss.

Dawkins does us all a service by challenging much that is wrong
about religion: for instance its appalling propensity for violence.
However, the answer to the failures of religious believers is not
to abolish religion but to repent of these failures and to learn
from our mistakes.

Dawkins does his cause a disservice by misdescribing the
relation between religion and morality: it is not that religion
reinforces a pre-existent morality; rather that each religion
empowers its adherents to act in society according to its own
distinctive morality (which may well overlap with the morality of
other religions, as with the 'golden rule' to treat others as you
would have them treat you. This is common to all the major
monotheistic religions.) In the case of Christianity, the morality
which we struggle to enact is based upon the teaching of Jesus, who
constantly challenges the religious values of his own time: 'You
have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbour and
hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for
those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father
in heaven. (Mt 5: 43-5)'

This key aspect of Christianity is completely missing from
Dawkins argument. Christians have to acknowledge that from the
outside Christianity can be seen as a religion which
performs and affirms certain moral values, some of which Dawkins
does not like or understand. From the inside, it contains a
critique of religion, because religion so easily becomes
self-satisfied, legalistic and violent. Jesus was a great religious
teacher - precisely because he warned so strongly of the perils of
religion. Dawkins too warns us of the perils of religion, but fails
to engage with the positive message of Jesus, in which is the
promise of Life.